The Life of a Hotel Doctor - Canceling a Housecall

The phone woke me at 11 p.m. A guest at the Doubletree wanted a doctor to examine his son's ear.

I had dressed and was preparing to leave when the phone rang again.

"I'm really sorry," said the guest. "The hotel called another doctor, and he's on his way, so we have to cancel." That was a shock. The Doubletree is one of my regulars. Was another doctor poaching? This is not a rare occurrence.

I asked the doctor's name. The guest wasn't certain. What was his phone number? He didn't know. I phoned the hotel. The operator assured me that she had given out my number and no one else's.

To my relief, I realized that the guest had simply changed his mind and wanted to cancel. He assumed that a blunt cancellation would upset me, so he invented an excuse - not realizing that the excuse was more upsetting.

In his regular column "The Life of a Hotel Doctor", Mike Oppenheim shares remarkable stories around visiting hotel
guests as a doctor. When he began as a hotel doctor during the 1980s, only luxury hotels had a “house doctor,” usually a
local practitioner who did it as a sideline. Nowadays, in a large city even the lowliest motel receives blandishments from
a dozen individuals plus several agencies that send moonlighting doctors if they can find one.